Comments on: Next Frontier: Comments

By: Conversation Fragmentation: Bloggers Have Duties | SheGeeks

Conversation Fragmentation: Bloggers Have Duties | SheGeeks — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:02:46 +0000

[...] If you want to know a few reasons why it’s so controversial see my article entitled "@Social Aggregators: Give Me My Comments Back" or Frederic of The Last Podcast’s articled, "The Next Frontier: Comments." [...]

By: Frederic

Frederic — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:17:37 +0000

Corvida – I liked you post on this and if that is ‘finding your way,’ I expect to see great things from you in the future

It’s going to be very interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.

If aggregation sites are only successful when they add commenting features, then we might just end up in a never ending circle of aggregation sites that aggregate other aggregation sites…

The only way to break that cycle is going to find some way of centralizing comments somewhere – but that works against the small group discussion feeling of a place like FF…

By: Corvida

Corvida — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:02:49 +0000

I wish I would’ve saw this earlier. I’m going to edit my post later to include a link to this. It’s great and way more simplified than my own rambling post. I’m still trying to find my way.

But I agree that there may be a solution to the problem in OpenID.

By: Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat :: I Want a Real Blog Aggregator

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat :: I Want a Real Blog Aggregator — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:27:32 +0000

[...] for everywhere in one place. I want integrated socialization, and especially threading and integrated commenting. And I think we can do it! Read on for a recipe for the perfect blog [...]

By: Frederic

Frederic — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:43:09 +0000

Bret, thanks for the comments and congrats on developing such an excellent product.

I agree with you about the quality of the conversation beinga lot higher if you are just talking to your friends. I’m simply fascinated by how we have started producing within aggregators (and I just singled out Friendfeed because it is the one I use the most right now). I guess in the long run, we might need yet another layer of meta-aggregators to really collect everything we write.

I’m also looking at it from the perspective of somebody with a small audience. Do I want me readers to comment on my blog, or in FF or AssetBar?

Charles might be on to something here. Maybe FF could offer such a widget in the long run.

By: Charles Hudson

Charles Hudson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:20:21 +0000

I’ve actually thought about this a lot. I found the same problem to be true with Plaxo Pulse. A nice “band-aid” would be a widget or plug-in that would allow me to display all 3rd-party commentary about my post or posts in a separate section right next to the native comments.

As someone with a small blog audience, I care more about having people read my stuff than I do about aggregating all conversations about my post in one place.

By: Bret Taylor

Bret Taylor — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:54:12 +0000

I am one of the founders of FriendFeed. We have lots of conversations about comments on FriendFeed, and we have discussed many of the issues you bring up in this post.

Initially, we talked about, e.g., reflecting comments in FriendFeed back to the original blog entry or Digg story. The main issue is that conversations in public forums (like Digg or this blog comment section) are extremely public, so they tend to devolve to the style of conversation typical in public discussion areas (the worst case being YouTube comments). Discussions on FriendFeed are entirely distributed, and limited to the social group of the person who shared the link. So if two people share the same item in Google Reader or Digg the same story, those people’s social groups will discuss the item separately. The discussions look a lot more like private conversations (i.e., they look like a private email thread) because the people talking about each other are directly or indirectly in the same social group. Consequently, the quality of the discussions tend to be a lot higher. We have found this to be one of the most appealing parts of FriendFeed: now you can informally discuss a blog post or YouTube video with people you know rather than with everyone in the world, which is surprisingly to difficult to do otherwise.

So, technical issues aside, I think there are a lot of complex social issues with aggregation and comments that we are just learning about now.